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Gene Gallerano grew up where highways are loud, barbecue smoke floats on the breeze and stories are as much a part of the landscape as the Trinity River. The Dallas native, now an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, returns this April in a vivid fashion with not one but two bold projects. The first is the atmospheric, practical-effects-driven creature feature The Yeti, and the other is a deeply intimate documentary about East Dallas country music darling Joshua Ray Walker titled Thank You for Listening. Both films are their own kind of homecoming — one shot through with icy terror, the other brimming with Texas soul — and each bears Gallerano’s unmistakable Dallas imprint.
“There’s the cliché: you can take the kid out of Texas, but you can’t take Texas out of the kid,” he says to the Observer. “People have said it’s a dangerous quote, but, you know, you might call it ‘swagger,’ but in Texas, we call it ‘walking.’”
With every project, Gallerano returns to that wellspring — filtering universal themes through the flavor and grit of North Texas. His films have Dallas at their core, drawing on neighborhood memories, local character and the restless creative charge of his hometown. Rather than just paying homage to his roots, Gallerano channels them, letting Dallas shape his storytelling voice and the very stories he’s determined to tell.
“There’s just the idea of being a Texan [that is being] really proud of being Texan no matter what,” Gallerano says. “There’s a little bit of that cowboy mentality in us. Even if you’re from the city, which I am, you still have that idea that we can do anything.”
A Cold Night in the Arctic, Built in Buffalo
If you appreciate the tactile magic of a classic creature feature, The Yeti is built for you. Co-written and co-directed by Gallerano and William Pisciotta, the film tracks a doomed 1940s expedition into the Alaskan wilderness. When two characters vanish, a search party soon discovers an ancient, towering threat stalking the ice.
Rather than relying on green screens and digital snow, the team built a massive Arctic soundstage in Buffalo.
“We were treating it like it was a character-driven film in many ways,” Gallerano says. “We built the whole thing practically, which is this great homage to classic creature features and classic Hollywood cinema. The film, to me, feels like a throwback to when movies had fingerprints on them. And you could feel it, and you can see the work, you can feel the craft. That kind of honesty feels really good to me right now in filmmaking.”
Gallerano and Pisciotta operated with a “backyard J.J. Abrams” mentality, chasing grand cinematic scope while embracing the creative friction of independent filmmaking.
“We call ourselves that, just without the J.J. budget. Trying to hit these big cinematic markers in our backyard,” Gallerano says. “We weren’t after studio scale. We were earning our own version of it.”
The monster creates the pressure, but the story reveals what happens to people when they run out of places to hide.
Brett Rodel
“Even though the monster is a massive part of this film, the creature isn’t the story, it’s the catalyst,” the director says. “The story is what these people turn into when there’s nowhere left to hide; from the creature, from themselves, from their backgrounds, from their stories.”
Gallerano recalls the moment the monster came to life on set: “The moment that the creature stepped onto the stage for the first time, everyone got really quiet. It was the first time we actually got to work with the creature, and you felt a beautiful friction of everybody thinking, ‘Okay, now we have to make sure that we do this. We are making a film now and this is a creature feature.’ The scale it brought was so exciting.”
You can catch the chilling spectacle when The Yeti hits AMC Theaters (including AMC NorthPark, AMC DINE-IN Mesquite and AMC Firewheel) on April 4 and April 8, before arriving on digital platforms on April 10.
The Spark of a Bottle Rocket
To understand Gallerano’s drive to build these ambitious worlds, you have to look back 30 years to a defining Dallas moment. Long before he was crafting monsters, a young Gallerano found himself working as an extra on Wes Anderson’s debut film, Bottle Rocket — of course, starring Dallas-raised brothers Owen and Luke Wilson.
“At the time, the Texas independent film scene felt entirely dominated by Austin,” Gallerano says. “Filmmakers like Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez held court down south, making the industry feel slightly out of reach for a kid from Dallas. Then you had the Wilson brothers. The point being is the Wilson brothers felt like they were one of us in many ways. They felt like they were ours. Our special thing in this kind of smaller city, Dallas. Every time you saw them in a movie, it felt like you were seeing kind of an older brother or an older cousin.”
He fondly remembers soaking up the infectious spirit and imperfections of Anderson’s set.
“I remember how magical and fun it was,” Gallerano recalls. “I couldn’t believe the spectacle and how everybody was just hanging out. It felt like something I needed to be part of.”
Gallerano also found lasting inspiration watching Anderson at work.
“Even Wes Anderson has these little moments where even he didn’t have the resources at the moment to fix things,” he says. “There’s just something beautiful in that. It proved that you could make movies right here, with your friends, in your backyard.”
A Safe Space for a Country Star
That exact spirit of homegrown collaboration is palpable with Thank You for Listening. Directed by Gallerano and Austin-based filmmaker Bob Ray, the short documentary traces the journey of rising Dallas musician Joshua Ray Walker. It captures the artist crafting his specific brand of East Dallas country music while enduring serious health struggles, all while looking toward a return to the Grand Ole Opry.
Gallerano’s connection to Walker goes way back.
“Josh, his mama, my mama — they grew up a mile apart from each other. We didn’t know it. Probably if our age gap was different, we would have hung out together,” Gallerano says. “It was really nice. My dad lives just down the street from [Walker] in East Dallas.”
To accommodate Walker’s grueling chemotherapy treatments, the production team needed a completely safe, controlled environment. Gallerano’s solution came straight from the Texas playbook: “We built a set in my mom’s attic so that he was safe to be able to come and interview and do the work — all these recreations. In a way, I was building a home within my home in the home state.”
Presented by Texas Monthly and PBS, the film weaves together themes of devastating loss, vibrant memories and the healing power of art.
“There’s a beauty in just an understanding of where we came from,” Gallerano says. “And there’s nostalgia. That’s really helpful. Sharing a common fabric of storytelling is really important.”
The documentary will celebrate its premiere at the Dallas International Film Festival, which runs from April 23 to April 30 at Cinépolis Victory Park. Festival passes are available for purchase on the festival’s website.
Whether he is trapping characters in a snowstorm with a mythical beast or capturing the quiet resilience of a local musician fighting for his life, Gallerano tells stories that matter.
“I’m always looking for a way back home,” he says. “I’ve always tried to keep finding my way back to Texas, keep finding Texas stories, keep finding characters that I think inspire me and that inherently have all these characteristics that I understand as a Texan.”
He balances the collaborative dependency of documentary filmmaking with the bold, sweeping vision of narrative cinema. More importantly, he continually finds a way to share that common fabric of storytelling with the city that raised him. He found his way back home, and we are the lucky ones who get to sit in the dark and watch what he built.
